Chase Darkness with Me

by Billy Jensen

  “If I was going to dump a body, where would I do it?”

  Sometimes he got out of his car, walked along the mountainous terrain, through the pull-off areas where the grass is worn out by impromptu piss breaks taken by weary travelers during the hour-long ride to the coast.

  He was looking for any signs of Jade—or more specifically, Jade’s body.

  “This is the type of county where it would be easy to kill and dispose of a body,” he said. He believed in his gut that Jade was dead.

  There was some hope—if you want to call it that—for an answer in 1998. Wayne Adam Ford, a truck driver from Arcata, walked into the sheriff’s department in neighboring Humboldt County and pulled a plastic bag from his pocket. Inside was a woman’s severed breast. Ford preyed on hitchhikers and confessed to killing four women, including the one whose breast he carried into the station that day. Could he have any answers?

  Negative. Ford said his earliest kill was 1997. He said he knew nothing of Jade. Mohon, Wilmer’s private eye, learned that Ford was in the Midwest during the time of Jade’s disappearance.

  Around the same time, a young woman entered an abortion clinic and signed her name as Jennifer Wilmer. The missing-persons infrastructure was set in motion. Could it be her?

  It wasn’t. The woman was a scared fourteen-year-old girl who was trying to hide the pregnancy from her parents. She had seen Jennifer’s missing poster and chose the name as an alias.

  The $20,000 the Wilmers had spent on private investigators produced only hazy possible scenarios.

  One focused on a man named Happiness, whom Susan went looking for in the Nassau Coliseum parking lot at a recent Grateful Dead show on Long Island. Happiness was thought to be able to provide the true identity of a Deadhead regular known as Cowboy Fred, an older man who Susan says “was obsessed with” Jade. “He may well be who murdered her,” she told me.

  “Cowboy Fred was a dude Jennifer was scared of for some reason; no one knew why,” Mohon, the private investigator, told me. “He was an older guy and would follow her around Arcata plaza.”

  Arcata police chief Randy Mendosa tossed another theory at me. “It could be totally innocent,” he said. “She could have stumbled into somebody’s grow, and they got threatened.” It was an interesting definition of “totally innocent.”

  Or Jade could have been hitchhiking to the farm. Maybe she got a ride but in the car had second thoughts about going—they had said they weren’t looking for any help right away. Maybe she said to herself, You know what, I’m gonna go to the coast and meet up with Tro. Tro usually spent the weekends in Arcata and would stay until Tuesday to watch Monday Night Football in town. So maybe Jade took the ride all the way down Route 299 to Arcata and something happened along the way.

  I tried to track down Tro Patterson as best I could from afar, pre-social media. Without the budget to fly to California, that meant a series of dead-end phone numbers, calls to ex-girlfriends, and leaving messages at dive bars. I couldn’t find him. I did find his father, Jay Patterson, who claimed he didn’t know where he was.

  “He’s up north,” he told me. “I was hoping that we could get over this calamity, rather than open up a festering old wound.”

  “But the wound has never been closed,” I told him. “Jade is still missing.”

  Immediately after Jade disappeared, Jay Patterson was in constant contact with the Wilmers. But that December, he became connected to another heart-wrenching situation. One of his employees’ children had been kidnapped. Polly Klaas was a twelve-year-old girl who was abducted from her bedroom three hours south of Trinity just eighteen days after Jennifer had gone missing. After that, according to Susan, Patterson stopped talking to the Wilmers.

  I pressed Jay Patterson again, and he stuck to his claim that he had no idea where his son was. Tro and his cohorts were living in one of the places in America where people run to get away from society. They specifically did not want to be found. Even after the story was published, I kept looking.

  Five months later, I found him.

  On August 29, 2003, Tro Patterson was found dead in California. He had committed suicide.

  Again, I had written a story with no ending.

  Jennifer would be the first member of the Humboldt Five, a name coined by California missing-persons activist Brenda Condon. Five women who went missing in what is considered one of the most dangerous swaths of land in America, filled with marijuana crops and biker gangs, where the drugs were plentiful, the trees hid secrets, and the locals distrusted any semblance of authority. People running away from their lives found themselves in Humboldt, five hours north of San Francisco. Humboldt made its own rules under the redwoods and could turn on a dime from heaven on earth to a forest of hell.

  Google “Humboldt Five” and you’ll find a map, with photos of each of the women superimposed directly above the locations where they were last seen.

  Jennifer Wilmer is in the top right corner, her frosted Long Island locks and serious Catholic school pose from the St. Mary’s High School yearbook a stark contrast to the other missing girls, who portrayed more of the free spirit that she would later become in Northern California. On the map, she seemed so separate from the other girls—in geography (she was last seen in the town of Willow Creek, forty miles from the others), looks, and, most noticeably, timeline. The date she was last seen was printed below the photo: September 13, 1993.

  On the left side of the map by the coast are Christine Walters, November 14, 2008, and Karen Mitchell, November 25, 1997. They both went missing from Eureka, California, a port town about halfway between San Francisco and Portland.

  In the center is Sheila Frank, February 2, 2014. Sheila was thirty-seven when she disappeared, standing five foot five, 120 pounds, strawberry blond hair, blue eyes. She was last seen in Fortuna, eighteen miles south of Eureka, at her boyfriend’s house. The boyfriend, a man named Jim Jones, said Sheila had gone for a walk, and he never saw her again.

  Next to Sheila in the center of the map is Danielle Bertolini. Underneath her picture reads February 9, 2014, seven days after Sheila went missing.

  With blond hair, pencil-thin eyebrows, freckles, and a bright smile punctuated by a diamond stud pierced above her lips, Danielle had a magnetic personality and didn’t shy away from speaking her mind. She grew up in Maine and loved being outdoors. Camping, fishing, hunting, the ocean. She loved any kind of water.

  In May 2010, twenty-year-old Danielle was six months pregnant when a doctor gave her the devastating news. Her unborn baby boy, who she was going to call Xavier, had Edwards syndrome, in which an extra chromosome 18 disrupts normal development. Danielle knew he would not survive. But when she couldn’t dilate, the doctors had to do emergency surgery. They had to “take him out piece by piece,” her mother, Billie Jo Dick, told me. “Danielle freaked. That’s when her world changed forever.”

  Two months later, she moved to California and began trimming marijuana crops on a mountain in Humboldt. She spent four years on the mountain. Billie Jo pleaded with her daughter to leave Humboldt County and come back home to the East Coast. Danielle said the same thing Jade had told her mother two decades earlier: “It’s beautiful here, Mom.”

  Then in February 2014, Danielle disappeared.

  She was last seen near Highway 36 in the Swains Flat area, forty miles southwest of Eureka. The police had learned that her ride into town that day in February never showed up, but she was picked up by a man who said he dropped her off by her house and never saw her again. The man’s name? Jim Jones.

  Missing-persons posters went up. Missing: Danielle Bertolini, 24. Five foot two, 105 pounds, blond hair, blue eyes. Last seen in Fortuna. Goes by “Nellie.”

  Nellie talks to her sister almost daily, the poster read, but has not contacted family members since the 10th of February, which is totally out of character for her.

  A year went by wi
th no sign of Nellie.

  A month later, in March 2015, a local man was heading home on his ATV from a day of fishing along Eel River near Ferndale when he spied something white buried in the sand. He quickly recognized it as a human skull. The mandible was gone, along with all the teeth save two molars in the upper right of the jaw.

  The county coroner’s office collected the skull and searched the surrounding area for more remains or clues. They found none.

  Danielle’s mother, Billie Jo, was back in Maine when she got a phone call telling her about the skull. She says they told her they had compared dental records and said it wasn’t Danielle’s. But Billie Jo knew. She just knew in her gut it was her daughter’s skull. Two months later, they called her back. This time, they had compared DNA of tissue that was preserved in the skull against Danielle’s. It was a match.

  Fortuna Police Department chief William Dobberstein told the local NBC affiliate “we have identified a person of interest in both cases [Sheila Franks and Danielle’s], and it’s the same man. We aren’t releasing his name at this time.”

  I knew what that name was. I was investigating the Humboldt Five cases for Crime Watch Daily. While the police didn’t have enough to make an arrest, that wasn’t going to stop us from paying Jim Jones an unscheduled visit and asking him some questions.

  We sent a crew to Humboldt in the spring of 2016 for a story to air in the fall. By the time we got there, the police were ready to name names. “James Jones was involved with Sheila and was the last person to see Danielle,” Fortuna police officer Brian Taylor told us. But they still didn’t have enough evidence to make an arrest. We tracked Jones down, and our correspondent Andrea Isom knocked on his door, coming face-to-face with the man many believe has information about the last moments of Danielle’s and Sheila’s lives. A bald and hulking Jones answered the door wearing a bright orange shirt and a confused expression. He refused to talk. We would all have to wait for a break in the case.

  Billie Jo’s younger daughter, Mariah, had just gotten a tattoo on her left thigh in her sister’s memory—Danielle’s name written below a cross with angel’s wings.

  Billie Jo continued to talk to her daughter in death through the “MissingNelly2014” Facebook page she created.

  Oh Nellie why does everything we do for you have to be so hard? You’re in a better place now and I get that part. What I don’t get is how this monster gets to roam around looking for others to do the same thing too… I just want this over with and him behind bars where he belongs.

  —Oct. 24, 2015

  A week later, she posted:

  Been a very long and rocky path Nellie that we have been down honey. Please open up the eye’s and hearts of people there, baby girl. We need to bring you and Sheila home, honey… Point us baby girl in the right direction… Nana sends big hugs. I love you to the moon n back

  Then on April 4, 2016, after Danielle’s skull was found:

  I’m already not liking the idea of having to make funeral arrangements for you… Momma just wants you to know how very special you are to me. Please baby girl try and make this as easy on me as you can because I already am a basket case. Hugs and kisses baby girl. All my love momma

  Billie Jo wanted to bring her daughter home—all of her daughter.

  Then on Friday afternoon, November 11, 2016, I got a message that Billie Jo couldn’t find her daughter Mariah. Danielle’s sister was now gone too.

  She had been missing for three days. She had cancelled a scheduled visit with her son and was last seen at her grandmother’s house in Medford, Oregon, on November 8.

  I immediately contacted Billie Jo. She was three thousand miles away at her home in Maine, her nightmare on repeat, only now with the added horror of knowing that the last time one of her daughters went missing, a year later, they found her skull in a riverbed. Billie Jo told me Mariah might be with some guys in Medford. She mentioned a white truck they might be in. Or possibly a black car.

  It wasn’t much to go on. I started a page, “Missing Mariah Bertolini,” and posted the missing flyer that had already been made: photos of Mariah smiling, of Mariah holding her toddler son, of Mariah with a horse, and of the tattoo she got to remember her sister. The text read:

  Missing: Mariah Bertolini. Mariah cancelled a scheduled visit with her son, which is out of character for her. She seemed to be crying and upset last time she was with family. Mariah left her grandma’s residence on Table Rock Rd. with an unknown male in a white truck. She is not answering her cell phone and had not been in contact with her family since 11/07/16. She was wearing black stretch pants, gray boots, and a long gray sweater. Mariah has a tattoo on her left thigh that reads “Danielle” and a pirate lady on her right outer leg.

  I targeted a twenty-five-mile radius around Medford—anything smaller would barely reach anyone, as the population up there is pretty sparse. I started cold-calling local businesses to see if anyone had seen her. I also ran Facebook and Twitter ads targeting the cities of Crescent City, Redding, Arcata, and all points in between.

  Go ahead and find those places on a map. They are the end of the race for a lot of people running. Even into the 1990s, teenagers from across the country were still landing in San Francisco to dig up the time capsule of the Summer of Love. They quickly realized that dream had rotted in the ’70s, been ridiculed in the ’80s, and by the early ’90s was preparing to be wiped away by the impending Silicon Valley boom. But some of those time-traveling pioneers had heard stories about a place where the dream was still possible.

  Shares of the ad on the “Missing Mariah Bertolini” Facebook page were piling up. That’s what happens with the missing. You get a lot of shares. People want to help by spreading the word. But tips? People writing in the comments that they have information? Most of the time, the comments are a wasteland.

  I was four hours into the search when we got our first spark of hope. Mariah had apparently called her mother from an unfamiliar phone number. She barely said anything and hung up quickly. But Billie Jo was sure it was her. When the last important phone call you remember is the one where you learned your daughter’s skull was just found, your mind is going to go to the darkest places. For Billie Jo, hearing Mariah’s voice meant she was alive. But it didn’t mean she was safe.

  She tried calling the number back, but no one picked up. She tried over and over again. She gave the number to law enforcement to trace or ping its location but heard nothing back.

  I asked her for the number. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. But I had to try something. She gave it to me, and I promised I would let her know if I was able to get through.

  Then I sat there looking at the ten digits. What was I going to do?

  It’s probably a guy she’s with, I thought to myself. Maybe a dealer, maybe a player. I couldn’t just call him. If I called out of the blue, he would either not answer or hang up just as soon as I got my name out. And any chance I had would be blown.

  No. I would text him. And I would be vague. Who would this guy answer a text from? If he was a dealer, he would answer a text from a buyer. If he was a player, he would answer a text from a girl.

  I grabbed my burner phone, entered the number, and typed in the vaguest thing I could think of: “Hey.”

  I pressed send.

  Nothing.

  I waited thirty minutes and tried again, this time with something a little more specific: “You there?”

  Nothing. But the table was set, and curiosity was stirred. After those two messages, if I called, there was a fifty-fifty chance the guy was going to pick up—either to find out if this was some girl he had given his number to or a guy he had met looking to score, or to just put a stop to some random pain in the ass who might continue to bug him all night with texts.

  I waited five minutes and called the number.

  It rang twice.

  And then an answer.<
br />
  “Hello,” said the guy on the other end of the line. He sounded young. No more than thirty.

  “Oh hey, it’s Billy,” I said. “I am looking for Mariah. Is she with you?”

  “Um, she’s actually not with me right now,” he said. “She went to the market.”

  Who the hell uses the word market? I asked myself. But I kept going. I told him who I was, a journalist in Los Angeles looking for her.

  “Can you have her call me back?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Can you please have her call me back?” I repeated.

  “She’s actually not coming back here.”

  “Why? Where did she go?”

  He hung up.

  I waited ten more minutes, then called the number again.

  A woman answered.

  “Hey, who’s this?” I said.

  “This is Mariah Bertolini.”

  She was safe.

  “Well, you had everybody really worried. As you know,” I said.

  She knew, she said.

  I introduced myself, saying I was an investigative reporter in Los Angeles. I asked her where she was.

  She responded, “Does it matter?”

  She kept trying to get off the phone. I kept trying to keep her talking.

  “I worked on your sister’s case,” I said.

  She remembered. “I really appreciate that, thank you.”

  “Here’s the deal,” I began. “I’m glad you’re safe. You don’t have to tell me where you are. But your sister’s case. I want to make sure that the guy we all think is the guy who killed her is arrested. I want to see him behind bars. And I need your help. That’s what I want to work on now that I know you’re safe. I want to work on that. Stay safe, please. That case bothers me so much. And I need your help.”

  She promised she would call back the next day after she went to Walmart to get a new phone, and we said goodbye. I knew she wasn’t going to call back, but I wanted to give her a reason for sticking around this life. I wanted to let her know that I needed her help to solve her sister’s murder and to pin the guy we all thought was responsible to the wall. I wanted her to realize that it wasn’t just about her. There was something bigger that needed her.